Rathke. Her name is Kathryn RATHKE—and you can find her here.
Last night, as I was shuffling through variations of KR—Kathy Radke, Radtke, Kathryn—I thought of “Rathke” but, for some reason, didn’t plug it in.
D’oh! I tried it this time, and her site came out on top of the search.
And how did I get Rathke? Because I pulled out some old Cardinal stuff to try to find more examples of her work (and of John’s and Mark’s), and I saw the story “Researchers may be falsifying data” by Sue Rathke—the Shirley-Bassey-belting sister! (Hi Sue!)
(And, holy shit, there’s a piece by Anthony Shadid—“Revolution may be imminent in Colombia”—yeah, that Anthony Shadid. Decent article, but too bad about the shitty headline.)
Ahem. Here was one of Kathy’s pieces that I remember, perhaps because it accompanied my cover piece for a special women’s issue:
Kathy Rathke, 1987
Click on the piece to enlarge it, to really appreciate Kathy’s , er, Kathryn’s eye.
Oh! And here’s a bonus piece, from that same issue:
And here’s one from John, from 1986:
The muskrat has changed over the years—check the characters on the top right of this page.
(Sorry, John, if this isn’t your best piece—I still remember your women’s studies strips!—but it, uh, happened to have been on the back of one of the articles I wrote.)
And have I mentioned that John Keefe, who was the Boy Wonder Editor in the mid-late eighties, is now a news producer for WNYC?
Damn. Some mighty talented folk working back then. No wonder I kept them all in mind.
~~~
Still, my mind’s a bit wrecked by all of this.
One of the characters in my second novel observes that The past is a sketchy bitch, but here, now, rootching through those old Cardinal fragments, a quarter century disappears and the past comes rushing to me.
My life wasn’t great back then—self-destructive depression, anyone?—but in college the despair hadn’t yet eroded my enthusiasm, my yearning, for more.
All of those people, all of that talent, all of the beer and pizza and arguments and ferocity and pressure and anger and humor, all of that. . . love.
What luck once to have had it all, what sorrow to have lost it, what wonder to have found that more remains.
AbsurdBeats 